Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Chris Floyd on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War

So here we are. Ten years on from the frenzied paroxysm (or was it an
orgasm?) of mass violence -- which was itself the culmination of years
of the bipartisan war-by-sanctions that American officials have openly
acknowledged killed more than half a million Iraqi children -- what is
the central "moral" issue of our national politics today? This
once-unimaginable, horribly depraved and obscene question: Should the
president be allowed to murder any American citizen he chooses, or
should there perhaps be be some kind of secret Congressional oversight
of the secret killing program? (The idea of restricting the president's
power to kill any filthy foreigner he chooses is not in question anywhere in our national politics, of course; Rand Paul wasn't filibustering against that idea. No, any debate on the "ethics" of state murder is restricted to its application to Americans, who, as we know, are the only fully human beings on the face of the earth.)

Given
the current trajectory of our plunge into barbarism, I predict that in
just a few years we'll be "debating" whether the president has the right
to stick the severed heads of "terrorists" on spikes outside the White
House, or if the heads should be passed around discreetly to members of
the relevant Senate committees before being dumped in the ocean.